"Mother" is a droll look at one grown man’s earnest if curdled attempts
to figure out why his relationship with his mother – and by extension,
all the other women in his life – is so fraught with criticism,
misunderstanding and embarrassment.

When his second wife divorces him, science-fiction novelist John
Henderson (Albert Brooks) feels the need to examine his life and
therefore comes up with an unusual method of exploring his emotional
problems. In what he terms "an experiment," John moves back into the
home of his mother Beatrice (Debbie Reynolds), even recreating his old
room from his high school days in an effort to figure out why all of
his male-female relationships self-destruct. Mother is nonplused by her
firstborn’s return to the nest, as she has a life of her own and a very
set way of doing things.

The wit in the script by director/star Brooks & Monica Johnson is
in its nuances. Any film can show a mother urging her grown son to eat,
but it takes "Mother" to show the duo locked in polite but stubborn
combat over whether economical frozen salad and ancient sherbet covered
in "protective ice" is better than the fresher, more expensive stuff
found at the supermarket. Despite her eccentricities, Beatrice is not
depicted as a caricature; indeed, much of the point here is that John’s
problems stem partly from his inability to see Beatrice as a person in
her own right, rather than simply as his parent.

As John, Brooks employs his customary semi-self-absorbed, neurotic but
articulate screen persona, filling the custom-designed bill well.
Reynolds is an ideal mixture of patrician courtesy and rocklike
intransigence, with a shrewdness that belies the character’s occasional
bouts of vagueness.

The imagery is generally Southern California-bright, transferred
sharply to the DVD. Sound is clean but rather quiet, with the
center-channel dialogue a bit low even when there’s absolutely nothing
except room ambience to accompany it – viewers may want to raise the
volume on their system for the duration of the film. Background noise
is nicely varied but sometimes seems slightly artificially separated
from the dialogue. The musical score is spread evenly throughout mains
and rears, with an instrument that sounds like a tuba creating a
humorous bass effect from time to time.

The dialogue is consistently smart, not going for hard punchlines so
much as smiles of recognition. As a filmmaker, Brooks eschews both
mean-spiritedness and schmaltz in favor of a tone of mildly neurotic
affection. There are barbs here, but they never get too ugly. Brooks
consistently provides the feeling that there’s a new revelation just
around the corner. His climactic epiphany is a little on the
overly-tidy side, but his style is both idiosyncratic and easy to
watch. In "Mother," Brooks taps into some near-universal truths about
dealing with family in entertaining fashion without making us cringe.
This is a rare and commendable (if not earth-shaking) accomplishment.